


Livin’ in a Pure Illusion (come to your own conclusions)

by DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adam is So Done, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Families of Choice, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Shiro & Allura Friendship, Shiro (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Shiro (Voltron) is So Done, Shiro (Voltron) is a Mess, Tangled AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-20 23:00:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15544080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee/pseuds/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee
Summary: “This is the story of how I died…”“Takashi, if I couldn’t see you breathing in front of me right now I’d kill you for saying that.”“…Or not, because Adam is a lovely, caring, forgiving person with pretty eyes…”“Just tell your story before you give me a migraine and Lance more bad habits.”





	Livin’ in a Pure Illusion (come to your own conclusions)

**Author's Note:**

> I woke up with this idea and it wouldn't go away. 
> 
> I have no other excuse. Enjoy this unedited thing. 
> 
> (side meta: this happened because I really do like Shiro and Allura's interactions and how they support each other and care for each other, and I was like 'how about a fairytale where the princess and the guy who finds her don't fall in love, they're just friends and that's ok???')

**Livin’ in a Pure Illusion (come to your own conclusions)**

_“This is the story of how I died…”_

_“Takashi, if I couldn’t see you breathing in front of me right now I’d kill you for saying that.”_

_“…Or not, because Adam is a lovely, caring, forgiving person with pretty eyes…”_

_“Just tell your story before you give me a migraine and Lance more bad habits.”_

_“So this is the story of how I died…OW, Adam, your elbows are sharp.”_

_“That wasn’t me, that was Keith.”_

_“Okay, so I didn’t die, not even a little bit, moving on, this isn’t even a story about me, this is a story about a beautiful princess in a lonely tower, far, far away…”_

…

            It’s after dark and Shiro is very, very, completely and utterly _done_ with running for his life. The crown isn’t worth this. The money he’d get from selling the crown isn’t worth this. The cause he’d spend the money he got from selling the crown on…is totally worth this, what is Shiro thinking.

            Allura, the princess from the tower – and seriously, who did that in this day and age?  Shiro liked to think the kingdoms had moved past the whole penning up princesses phase but clearly that wasn’t remotely true. At least they weren’t sending crown princes off on potentially fatal quests in the name of proving themselves anymore. Three separate succession crisis in the past decade had at least killed that trend. Allura is poking at the campfire with a long stick, staring at the sparks shooting up with a kind of wide-eyed fascination.

            “I’ve never been camping before,” she admits from behind the veil of her long pale hair. Her consonants are crisp, her language uncluttered with the slurring or slang life city life stamps into the ordinary citizen’s speech. Her bare toes curl in the grass, luxuriating in the feel of the earth beneath her feet, like she could grip the ground tight and never be taken from it again.

            Shiro doesn’t know how he knows she’s a princess. Then again, who else would be shut up in a tower like that? But Allura doesn’t know anything about her family, she only mentions her Aunt Haggar (who sounds terrible, let’s be honest, anyone who forbids a grown adult from leaving her own home isn’t exactly guardian of the year) and she grows upset whenever Shiro asks about them.

            He’s decided to leave it alone for now.

            Allura rests her chin on the heel of her hand, orange tongues of flame reflected in her blue eyes. She looks halfway between happy and sad, that sort of meditative melancholy that could tip either way.

            “I’m realizing I’ve lived for eighteen years and I’ve never really done anything, have I?” she gives a little self-deprecating laugh, “I’d fill my days with…activities. But I never did anything. I’ve had more adventure in one day out here than I ever did for almost twenty years up there.”

            Shiro smiles slightly to himself, looking down at his hands, scraped and scuffed from scaling multiple walls, being chased through woods and caves and over cliffs far too much for his own comfort, and says, “To be fair, the average day doesn’t have this much adventure in it for me either.”

            She laughs. “That makes me feel a little better, I think.” She sets aside the stick and leans back on her hands, staring up at the sky. “I’m learning how much I don’t know, and it’s so…so…”

            “Humbling?”

            “Frustrating!”

            A laugh jumps out of Shiro’s mouth like it’s been punched from his diaphragm. “Welcome to real life, I guess.”

            Allura pouts slightly, flicking a long sheaf of fluffy white hair over one shoulder, but goes back to looking at the sky. “It seems so much bigger out here.”

            Shiro knows what she means. He’d spent his childhood staring at the stars from a narrow attic window.  The sky had opened up the moment he’d stepped outside those four creaky walls. It wasn’t until lonely years had begun to pass him by that he’d begun to miss the warmth of someone he loved at his back, staring at the stars with him.

            “You said something about the lights,” Allura begins, contemplative and hesitant all at once, “The ones I see every year on my birthday.”

            “The lantern festival,” Shiro responds, half on autopilot as he pushes down the memory of pennies in dirty palms, hoarded for months for that very occasion. “Every year the King holds the festival for his daughter.”

            “He must love her very much.”

            “He did. Does,” Shiro gestures vaguely, “She disappeared when she was very young. The King and the Prime Minister hold the festival, in the capitol, hoping she’ll see the lights and find her way home.”

            Allura’s blue eyes are locked on him, “Was that her crown you stole?”

            Shiro’s face burns slightly. “Yes.”

            “Why?” she demands, “That was probably one of that man’s last mementos of his daughter!”

            Only a girl from a tower would call the king ‘that man’. “It’s not like she’s wearing it! Do you know how much it’s worth? One of the stones from that tiara could feed a family for a year. _One_.  A small one feeds a family for a year, a large one? Could buy them an _estate_. The gold would furnish it; the silver could buy the seed and stock to turn it into a prosperous farm in a season.” Shiro shrugs. He understands the sentiment, he does, but he also knows what it is to be hungry. And he’s known plenty of hunger in his life.

            “So what do you want to do with it?”

            “What?”

            Allura shrugs, “If you’re stealing it because no one’s using it, then you must think you have a better idea. So. How are you using it?” She grins mischievously, “You could always wear it.”

            Shiro snorts, but it’s soft. “No, I’d melt it down. Break up the pieces and sell them in different places.”

            Allura raises an eyebrow, asking a question.

            “No one’s going to buy a whole crown. It’s like asking the royal guard to come for you.”

            She smiles, “Those were the men chasing us today.”

            “Yes. They’re nothing if not persistent.”

            “They’re dedicated.”

            “I’d appreciate the dedication more if it didn’t involve hunting me like a stag.”

            “True. What would you do with the money?”

            “From the crown?” Shiro can’t meet her eyes, nostalgia and a thin thread of regret weighs too heavily on his shoulders. “I’d take it home.”

            She doesn’t look away. There’s something a little unnerving about her unwavering stare, her innocent, honest hunger for the world.

            “I grew up in an orphanage,” Shiro admits, “It was crowded and old and we never had enough of anything. Me and Adam, my – ” how to describe Adam? Could he even say Adam was ‘his’ anything? “- my friend Adam and I, we looked after the little kids and we tried to keep everything going, but it was hard and there was never enough to go around.” Those were hard days, but they were lively and bright and touched with a kind of manic hopefulness. Him and Adam, Mama McClain and the kids; the orphanage against the world.

            “Mr and Mrs. McClain, they ran the orphanage, they offered to find apprenticeships for me and Adam when we were old enough. I got work on a ship, I had big dreams,” a wry laugh, “fighting pirates, bringing back a fortune in treasure, enough to rebuild the orphanage, to keep the McClains in luxury for years. I wanted to be a hero.” He wanted out of a stuffy attic room he’d shared with Adam and into the storybooks Adam used to read aloud to the younger children. He wanted to one of those fictional swashbucklers that lit a light in golden brown eyes.

            “Adam told me not to go, that it was dangerous. He read the papers, he kept up with things that which years were bad storm years and rumors about where the Galran Empire was taking their war next. I didn’t listen to him. The last time I saw him…we fought. I left.”

            “It didn’t end well.” Allura’s words are not a question.

            Shiro runs a finger over the scar across the bridge of his nose. “No. It didn’t. Six months in we were taken by a Galran raiding party. A week after that the Galran ship went down in a storm. I washed ashore the next morning half dead. A pair of Marmoran resistance fighters took me in and nursed me back to health.”

            “Was one of them a magician?” Allura nods toward his artificial arm.

            “Yes.” Shiro shakes his head. “I should be dead. I would have been if it weren’t for Thace and Ulaz.”

            “You want the crown for the orphanage.”

            Shiro shakes his head, “I want the money for the orphanage. The crown was just an easy way to get it.”

            Allura snorts, “Easy? You call any of this easy? We’re sleeping on dirt!” She’s grinning as she says it, though, voice slipping into a conspiratorial whisper as she tells him, “I’ve never slept on dirt before. I’m very excited.”

            Shiro chokes on a laugh and shakes his head at her enthusiasm. “You’re probably the only one I’ve ever heard say anything like that.”

            Allura smirks, “So I’m special.”

            “You could say that.”

            It’s later, after conversation has tapered off and the campfire has died down a bit, that Allura says into the darkness, “I think it’s admirable.  What you’re trying to do.”

            “It was stupid.”

            “Love tends to be.”

…

            Shiro is officially Completely Over adventures. He’d just like to nap for the next goddamn century, thanks.

            Unfortunately, he’s in prison now, which makes napping difficult.

            He’s in prison and Allura’s locked up wherever Haggar took her. He really should have seen the whole Allura-is-a-mage thing coming seeing as she entire existence is pretty goddamn weird to begin with. (He also has a sneaking, paranoid, conspiracy theory level suspicion that Allura might just be the missing princess the whole kingdom’s been mourning for years but that’s an issue to mess with later, when he’s less imprisoned.)

            When Haggar appeared Shiro’s first thought hadn’t even to be suspicious of her. Who’s suspicious of old ladies? He’s not exactly the demographic evil hags tend to target. He can’t help it; it’s just not his genre. (Shiro blames Adam and his library of penny dreafuls for the way he thinks of himself as a character archetype sometimes.)

            But then the stoop-shouldered old crone had flung a net of sickly purple lighting at Allura and Shiro thought _“Oh, so that’s Haggar,”_ just in time to get blasted off his feet.

            Allura countered the net with her own wavering corona of pink-tinged light but it rapidly became clear that where Allura and Shiro may have an advantage in a physical confrontation, they were hopelessly outmatched against Haggar’s magic.

            And then the King’s guards showed up.

            It’s all a violent blur after that for Shiro, but he remembers Allura wielding a long, sturdy stick like a quarterstaff and himself wrestling a sword away from the guard clutching it.  Allura’s power reminded him of Ulaz’s distantly, but on a scale Shiro has never seen in his life. Her magic must be tied to life and healing, judging by the way the forest responded to that cloud of rose petal pink light. Tree roots thrashing their way free of the earth in their rush to grow, to reach toward Allura, great shocks of grass spontaneously sprouting practically to hip-height. All around them guards fell like dominoes against the onslaught of Mother Nature’s enthusiasm. Shiro didn’t even have do much beyond standing mostly still and occasionally thumping a downed fellow on the head.

             For a moment it felt gloriously close to victory. But they’d taken their eyes off Haggar a moment too long. A bolt of bruise-black lighting took Allura in the chest, sending her crashing to the ground, all the plants that had sprung to there defense at her command withering in an instant as she fell.

            Shiro felt more than heard himself shout his friend’s name as he saw her fall, turning toward her, feet already moving into a surely fatal charge at Haggar. But they never did see if Takashi Shirogane could take on a witch and win.

            He’d taken his eyes off the guards too long and they had him. By the time he’d stopped struggling and looked up and away from his own shackled wrists, Allura and Haggar were gone.

            And now he’s here. He wonders if they still cut off hands for thievery in this kingdom. He’s never looked it up.  By all accounts he probably should have before he turned to a life of petty crime.

            He flexes the hand of the artificial arm Ulaz and Thace made him. He wonders if they’d make him another one if he showed up on their doorstep down a hand. He’d rather not, all things considered. He’s already missing one human hand. Being completely handless doesn’t really appeal.

            He’s so lost in his own morbid thoughts he jerks to attention when he hears scraping at the lock on his cell door. Shiro creeps closer. This could be his chance. If he could get the drop on the guard opening the door…

            He hears whispers on the other side of the wooden slab. The voices don’t sound particularly soldierly but Shiro’s not exactly an expert.

            “Lance, do you even know how to pick a lock?”

            “Just watch me, I can totally do it.”

            “Guys, hurry up, we’re gonna get caught.”

            “Chill, Hunk, watch the master at work. Keith, just…watch. Keep watch. Facing the other way.”

            “Oh yeah, that _fills_ me with confidence in your lock picking abilities.”

            “Can it, Pidge. I’ve gotta focus – oh crap.”

            “Did you seriously _drop the lockpicks?_ ” 

            “Shut up, Keith, try to find them.”

            “It’s a _dungeon_ and they’re _tiny_.” 

            Lance? Hunk? Keith? Oh god, Shiro doesn’t want to hope, he really doesn’t, they sound so much older, they can’t be…

            “Ow, Keith, watch it with your thick skull.”

            “Well if your big head wasn’t in the _way_ – ”

            Shiro clears his throat, “Guys, have you considered…taking the door off it’s hinges?” 

            Dead silence and then Pidge muttering, “Seriously, guys?”

            “Shiro! You’re alive!” Lance cheers over the sound of Keith scoffing, “Of course he is, dumbass, why would they lock up a corpse?”

            “I can totally take this door off its hinges,” Hunk interjects before the two other boys can start squabbling in earnest, “Just gimme a minute…hi Shiro, glad you’re not dead, by the way.”

            “You’re totally gonna be when Adam gets a hold of you, though,” Pidge deadpans, “But yeah, yay Shiro not being dead.”

            Adam. Oh god, Shiro is so dead when Adam gets a hold of him.

            “Can you hurry up, guys?” He asks instead of addressing the neon yellow, pink polka-dotted elephant in the room, “A friend of mine is kind of being held captive by an evil witch and I’d really like to save her if it’s not too late.”

            Silence and then Keith saying, “We have a lot to catch up on.”

            “Yeah, your post-not-death life sounds super wild, dude,” Lance agrees.

            “Okay, door opening in three, two, one…” Hunk announces as the door wiggles, wobbles, comes loose…and comes crashing down into the wall next to the cell doorway, only supported by the strip of iron from the lock.

            “How much you wanna bet no one heard that?” Lance says into the ensuing silence.

            “I don’t take sucker bets,” both Keith and Pidge say in unison.

…

            “WHAT DID I SAY ABOUT BEING SUBTLE?” Adam demands as they emerge from the dungeon and round the corner to find him sitting in –

            “IS THAT AN AUTOMOBILE?” Keith demands, practically vibrating with excitement.

            “Yeah, I built it,” Matt, Pidge’s brother, says, sticking his head out the back, “Isn’t is awesome?”

            “We’re all gonna die,” Hunk whimpers.

            “I wanna rob a bank and escape in this,” Keith says because apparently time does not make Keith any less insane.

            “Get in, all of you,” Shiro orders, “Hunk, no extreme pessimism, it’s demoralizing, Keith, no bank robberies, Pidge, no modifications, Lance and Matt, whatever you’re thinking, NO.”

            Matt wipes away a probably fake tear, “We all missed you, my friend.”

            Shiro smiles tightly as Adam barks, “You heard my mysteriously undead boyfriend, move, people, move!”

            Shiro sort of deserved that.

            They pile into the auto and Adam starts the engine, flashing white teeth in a tight grin. Sunlight reflects off the lenses of his glasses, highlighting the gold flecks in his eyes.

            “Where to?” he asks, resolutely staring forward and not meeting Shiro’s gaze which…Shiro probably deserves that too.

            “We have to rescue a princess,” Lance says, sounding positively giddy at the notion.

            “I never said she was a princess,” Shiro points out.

            Five pairs of eyes give him a flat stare (Hunk has to look away quickly, as taking his eyes off the horizon in a moving vehicle triggers his motion sickness, but the sentiment is pretty present).

            “Okay, she’s probably a princess, but that hasn’t been proven yet.”

            “Is she a local princess?” Hunk asks, “because we’re all gonna need pardons after this jailbreak thing. I mean, Shiro, I love you man, and the minute we saw your name on that wanted poster we were all like ‘yeah, we gotta rescue him’, but…um…I’d rather not be a fugitive.”

            “Pretty sure she’s the one that went missing fifteen years ago.”

            Now even Hunk is staring at him, although the effort of his incredulity is turning him slightly green.

            “You got not-murdered by pirates and now you found a lost princess?” Lance yelps, “What even are you, dude?!?”

            “Not dead and really unlucky?” Shiro offers…eyeing Adam’s profile. His skin is warm and brown and traced with gold by the sun, his hair’s all soft mussed curls and everything about him makes something deep in Shiro’s gut ache, “Also incredibly stupid for not listening to Adam three years ago when he told me it was too dangerous.”

            Adam’s lips press together, his knuckles whiten as his hands clench tighter around the steering wheel.

            “Adam,” Shiro drags in a deep breath, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

            The entire auto holds it’s collective breath as they wait for Shiro’s past-present-maybe-future-always to reply.

            “I shouldn’t have tried to tell you what to do with your life,” Adam says tightly. His voice sounds strained, like someone grabs a fistful of his vocal cords and pulled them tight. “It was your decision to make.”

            “It had consequences for both of us,” Shiro points out, “I was selfish not factoring you into my plans. I offered to share my whole life with you, not just when it suited me.”

            A soft beat of silence and then, “Thank you.” 

            Shiro blinks, the light shifts, and catches on…trails of silent tears carving their silvery way down Adam’s cheeks.

            “I waited for you for so long. The ship was lost, but every time one of the survivors made their way back, I hoped. I might have waited for you forever.”

            Shiro reaches out; every move clearly marked and telegraphed, and cups the cheek closest to him and wipes away the salt water. The city flies back the car window but for a second everything is quiet and still. Adam’s face is warm under his hand.

            “This is super sweet, and Hunk is definitely sympathy crying like a baby – ”

            “Lance, not cool!”

            “But where are we going for the princess-rescuing part of this adventure?”

            “The forest, where else?” Shiro says over his shoulder, hand still cupping Adam’s face. He turns back to Adam, tracing the gold lines of that familiar, dear profile with his eyes and says, soft, only for him, “I was always trying to come back to you. I just did a really, really bad job of it.”

            Adam laughs wetly at that and takes the main road out of the city, into the forest and on to adventure.

…

            “I AM NOT YOUR HUMAN BATTERY!” Allura spits at Haggar as their magic collides, spitting sparks of multicolored light in every direction as Haggar animates whole suits of armor and sends them charging after Shiro and company.

            Hunk, Matt, and Pidge are trying to dismantle the apparatus Haggar clearly intends to use to drain Allura while Keith is flinging himself into battle against the active armor with a frankly disturbing intensity.

            “How exactly are we helping?” Adam asks.

            “We freed Allura,” Shiro points out, “She’s the one with the magic power.”

            “Ah, good to know we’re not cowards hiding behind the princess we came to help.”

            “No, we’re enabling her greatness.”

            “Sure.”

            Shiro is actually creeping along the edge of the room, eyeing Haggar, waiting for her to lose her focus. The moment she slips, he’s ready to pounce. He palms the switchblade he pickpocketed from the guards who took him to prison. He’ll be ready. Haggar just has to turn her back.

            Adam can sense he’s plotting something. Shiro can feel his eyes on the back of his head; he can sense it in the way Adam’s movements frame his. He always was protective.

            There it is.

            Keith beats back a suit of armor, Lance picking up a heavy frying pan and clocking the armor in the helmet.  Haggar makes a frustrated noise and flings up her other hand, driving more inanimate objects into battle against Keith and Lance while simultaneously holding off Allura’s attacks. The witch’s back is to Shiro and Adam for one brief, endless moment – and Shiro darts forward and jabs the knife at her exposed back.

             He’d been captured by enemy raiders. He’d lived with the Marmoran freedom fighters. He’d fought his way back to this place and stolen his life out from under the noses of the people who would take it away. He knows how to put a knife in a person’s back.

            But he doesn’t know how to fight a witch.

            Haggar plucks the knife from her robes and thrusts it toward him. They’re too close, he’s too close. He should have backed up, he should have gotten out of range –

            There’s a burning pain in his stomach and the world goes white then black.

…

            _He’s walking on a pane of glass. He’s floating through infinite space. Stars dot the sky, burning in a thousand brilliant colors. He can’t feel anything under his feet and there are stars between his toes, but a thin horizon line cuts through the place he’s found himself in._

_He feels infinite._

_He feels a part of everything._

_He feels like nothing at all._

_He’s lonely, he thinks. Then he wonders who ‘he’ is._

_He keeps walking over the field of stars and wonders where he’s going._

…

            Shiro comes to with a harsh gasp, a pair of warm hands framing his face and two sets of eyes, one blue, one whiskey-gold, peering down at him.

            “You _bastard_ ,” Adam growls at him, “You made me cry twice in one day.”  His hand tightens where it’s tangled up in Shiro’s shirt, clutching at the spot right over his heart.

            “Shiro, you’re alive!” Allura sounds relieved, “I wasn’t sure if that would work.”

            “Geez, Allura, don’t tell him _that,_ ” Lance complains.

            “It’s okay, he’s alive now, so it doesn’t matter, right?” Oh, Hunk, you ray of sunshine.

            “Quit dying on me, asshole!” and there’s Keith and, ow, seriously, did he have to kick him that hard?

            “What happened?” Shiro asks muzzily. He’s mostly in Adam’s lap with Allura vaguely patting his head like she’s congratulating herself on a job well done.

            “We won!” Matt radically over-simplifies.

            “Adam stabbed a witch,” Keith deadpans, which is basically unbridled enthusiasm and admiration coming from him.

            “I may have lost my temper,” Adam admits.

            “And then Allura magicked you alive again,” Lance interjects.

            “I channeled the strength of everyone here’s love for you into healing energy,” Allura attempts to explain, only to be drowned out by the cacophony of everyone else’s enthusiastic accounts of their own heroics.

            Shiro mostly tunes it out, to be honest. He’s lying in Adam’s lap, they rescued a princess (or enabled her to rescue herself) and he’s pretty sure once they bring her to the palace and introduce her to King Alfor and Minister Coran the whole pardoning process with work itself out.

            Maybe there will even be reward money.

            But for now there’s Allura leaping to her feet and enthusiastically shaking the hands of all of Shiro’s ragtag band of friends and family and Lance throwing his hands around as he retells his and Keith’s epic battle with the suits of armor (Keith periodically interjecting to correct his exaggerations) and Pidge, Matt, and Hunk competing to see who can excitedly explain the theory behind Haggar’s device (and how they destroyed it).  Adam has practically wrapped himself around Shiro, rearranging the way they’re lying on the floor so they’re tangled up together.

            “Your hair is white now, like Allura’s. You’ve got to stop dying, Takashi,” Adam murmurs into his hair.

            Shiro’s heart stutters at the sound of his own name on Adam’s lips then picks up again double-time. “Does it make me look like a grandpa?” he asks because his heart’s going too fast for him to focus on trivial things like a smooth response.

            “No, it’s nice. Like starlight or something.”

            “Or something.”

            “Shut up.”

            “Mmm.”

            “Takashi?”

            “Yes?”

            “Can I kiss you?”

            “Isn’t that required for the happy ending part?”

            They’re both smiling when their lips meet.

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title is a bastardized quote from the version of 'Something That I Want' Grace Potter recorded for the Tangled credits because blatant references are blatant.


End file.
